easy vegetarian cooking for everyone, with a few ideas mixed in.

An Old Take on the New CSA Trend

In the past, I have written about my desire to join a CSA, but my hesitation with some of the limitations, such as signing up for a season despite our frequent travel, receiving too many veggies, the hefty fee, and finding a convenient drop-off point. We re-visted the conversation last week, but AAM and I found too many conflicts with joining. My desires to participate were drowned by the practical nature of our life.

In the coincidental nature of life, the other day I overheard the perfect solution to our dilemma. I was in the faculty room, and yet again our conversations floated to what we were eating. One of my teaching friends was eating a really fresh and yummy looking mango. So, of course we all peppered her with questions. Turns out, that she had joined Washington’s Green Grocer. Not a CSA, but similar to the concept, the company formed 15 years ago, when downtown D.C. still had horrific excuses for grocery stores. The door-to-door food delivery service boxes veggies, fruits, or dairy for you, and gives you more choice than a CSA would. In the Spring, Summer, or Fall, they send items from local farms. In the winter, when the DC area soil doesn’t offer anything but potatoes, they have a variety of farms they work with around the country, which still do good small farming practices, but aren’t necessarily in the DC area. On Sunday evenings, they announce the box ingredients, and where the food comes from. Depending on where you live in DC, your delivery day varies. Virginia is Wednesdays. The mid-week date actually gets me excited because we can perk up our meals at the end of the week, while still have fresh looking veggies if we want to have people over for dinner to share the wealth on the weekend!

2. Have too many veggies already? Going out of town? To cancel a delivery, just login and cancel. No penalty, no big deal.

3. Don’t like a veggie being delivered? There is a list where you can ban that item from your box. Oddly enough, I went over it, and there appears to be not a veggie that I won’t eat. I guess my pickiness is only of the no-meat variety.

4. If you live within the beltway, and some locations outside the beltway, they will deliver to your door.

5. Super fresh veggies, with the option of local cheeses and organic milk/eggs.

6. One of those things I never considered before having a baby is the trip to the grocery store (or the simple luxury of being able to run into Starbucks for coffee, oh, the memories.). It can be tough ordeal to take her, find everything while simultaneously preventing her from eating the bar on the grocery cart, load the car, wheel the cart back with her in it, grab her, buckle her into the car, once home, carry her to the crib, so I could carry the groceries up and down our 30 steps into our house. There is a reason I usually don’t cook grocery store nights.

7. We will be reserving trips to the grocery store for once in awhile staples, versus weekly needs.

8. For $37 a week, we get all the organic fruits and vegetables we need. This is about what we spend on regular vegetables already, and much cheaper than Whole Foods. For those interested in non-organic fruits and vegetables, it is $30 a box.

9. Just another method to spice up our menu and make me try new recipes.

10. You are supporting a local business making efforts to try to supply the best quality whole-foods to the DC community in an affordable, convenient, and green manner. Can’t argue with that.

So after all this positive posting, I must say I am excited for our first delivery next Wednesday. I will be sure to post my review of our box. For now, check out my friend’s blog about her Green Grocer experience, The Box Experiment

I’ve heard great things about this and am thinking of joining too! We joined a CSA for the past 2 years but pick up this coming season will be nearly impossible (I won’t be downtown to pick up for the majority of the season)so the alternative is the Old Town Farmer’s Market or the Washington Green Grocer. I’m leaning towards delivery 🙂